This is real progress. Thanks to the wonders of science, it is now easier than ever to receive junk mail in your own home. It does not only come via the postman or just fall out of newspapers and magazines. Now you can even get it sent to you by computer. On the Internet.
The other week, a consumer credit company cluttered the computer screens of millions of Americans by sending advertisements on the "Net." The company had been reading a book called "How to Make a Fortune on the Information Highway."The Church of Scientology in America is suing an Internet service provider and had got the police in Finland - and I had better get this right - to "raid anon.penet.fi to get their access records."
And we must not forget Kevin Mitnick, arrested after breaking into people's private computers via the Internet.
All this is terribly good news. One of the most infuriating things about the whole Internet business is the wholesome, self-satisfied, smug, born-again zeal of the experts ("John Keats didn't know anything about computers," begins one guide on how to work the Net).
Even the language they use, "surfing the Net," is designed to bring a freewheeling Californian lifestyle into your home every time you turn the computer on.
It is, they explain devoutly, completely nonprofit-making, and nobody owns it, and you often do not pay for it and it is a superhighway and all you want is there and nobody mucks about with it or controls it, we are all honest idealists, there is no censorship, the technology is ace and you are at the cutting edge of, well, everything. Electronic mail, e-mail, is so brilliant that they sneeringly call the one with stamps and envelopes "snail mail."
But some people have a healthy interest in surfing on the cutting edge, so I have spent the past week getting, or trying to get, on to the Internet. I wanted to find out if it opened up new frontiers of knowledge or whether it was just a socially useful place for lonely people without anybody real to talk to.
Virtual reality can be better than reality for many people. I could either be in contact with some of the greatest founts of information the world has ever known, or it could merely mean that I could conduct, at considerable expense, long conversations with people I would normally get off a train to avoid, childish people who believe that they should be obscene and not nerds.
It is doubtless a symbol of democracy to know that I can e-mail President Clinton@White House, but I've been able to post him a letter or ring him up for years. It's not exactly a breakthrough. You still don't get a reply.
It may be like wow! that I can read magazines and newspapers through my computer, but I can get them easily from a newsstand.
Every computer magazine, every article about the Net, tells you how amazing the whole thing is, with laptop computers in small European towns being connected to giant computers in California via a packet-switching network that sends some of your message via Kenya and the rest of it via Marseille.
But, amazement apart, what we all want to know is whether all that will change our lives or merely be as technologically significant as the nonstick frying pan. This is not a particularly Luddite argument; the Luddites, after all, smashed the machines because they knew the machines would change their lives.
The reassuring thing about the Internet is also the most annoying thing: The new technology requires an awful lot of old-fashioned books to help you understand all the myriad letters that you have to type to get anything out of the system. The basic book that everyone recommends will make the Internet easy has nearly 600 pages.
I am not a computer expert, but I am not a computer dummy, either - quite experienced, actually - and it did seem a bit strange to have so many letters and old-fashioned things like words, a bit like interfacing your computer with a quill pen.
The computer buffs at the Cafe Cyberia in central London told me that each collection of letters was a necessary part of the computer's instructions, the "address" of the documents, and there were many short-cuts on the highway. But it was clear from the light in their eyes that they are born-again pedants.
They may call themselves Cybernauts, they may have endless bits of software with snazzy acronyms, but they actually enjoy writing the long strings of symbols, remembering where to put the colons and the asterisks. It's a kind of initiation rite for access to the Internet.
But I paid my subscription to Easynet, chosen for its name, got a new identity and away I went, off to surf the highway, which may be a mixed metaphor but it's how they speak in the cafe, to find out whether John Keats was really missing out on anything.
There are nearly 9,000 discussion groups. There's one on sewing, another on Somalia, even on train-spotting.
Some of the ones I perused - sorry, surfed - seemed quite interesting, but I would not want to spend an evening interacting with strangers. I downloaded some images, from the Louvre, the Warhol museum and Playboy, even though it took an awfully long time (and a large telephone bill) for each picture to appear on my computer screen.
I learned a few things about Jerusalem from another information site, found out whether there is a flight from London to Addis Ababa next Tuesday, asked a question about malaria in the Far East to see if any expert could answer it (not so far).
I had a very good, if rather pointless, time.